Just a heads up, this week's release will be skipped for multiple reasons, consisting mainly of me being on vacation and current work going on mostly on the infrastructure (activation server, forum, and PHP7 support).

Yesterday evening, version 2.A2 of the TWLan went available for download, and today a few hours ago, (after some trouble) the incremental patch files are live too.
What does this mean?
The TWLan contains some sort of a auto-updater (still a very basic one though). This means that if you have a working 2.A1, you don't have to download anything new, or lose your game data.
All you have to do is restart the event system, and it will automatically patch your installation of the TWLan to a full 2.A2.

First of all, we would like to announce that one of the most active member in our community of all time, Yannici, has joined our team and will assist us in developing the TWLan.

Next, as most of you probably noticed, the forum has been down for maintenance for several hours. We did a major software upgrade and ended up having to manually convert quite a lot of data, prolonging the downtime.
Some things (mostly images) are still not being linked correctly, and we're fixing these things as we see them, but we're not actively hunting them. If you happen to find one of those, please create a post in the "Feedback" forum.

And finally, the release of version 2.A2 of the TWLan (scheduled for today) will be delayed by one day due to incompatibilities on things we've been working on.
This version will bring only very few (visible) changes though, because we've been mainly working on the infrastructure around it, such as the upgrade system and PHP 7 support (but it's still crashing way too often on PHP 7 for an alpha release).

Today five years ago, version 1.4 of the TWLan was released.
After that, there was nothing but silence, empty promises and broken hopes.

Now, what happened during the last 5 years?

When I joined the developer team back in late 2010, jumpa was long gone already, and I did get to talk to pl4n3, but he didn't plan to be part of the new team.
It was ultimately me, Chrissi, and Lekensteyn who were working on something like a TWLan 1.5 while faust was working on a bot for it.
We soon abandoned this though, because we realised that it would be less effort to just rewrite everything from scratch.
At this point, Chrissi became occupied with other stuff and left the team, and Lekensteyn disappeared more or less without a word.

Soon after, Agrafix told us that he was available again, and with him as project leader we started an attempt, based on the CodeIgniter framework.
We never got really far with it, though, and soon faust became PostOpus' sysadmin and was occupied with that, and agrafix left again.

At this point, DarkXin and Steffen joined me, and we decided that we all didn't like CodeIgniter, and since it wasn't too much code anyway, we started a new thing based on the Yii framework.
We worked on this for almost two years (although not continuously), and had a version that was by far playable, but we didn't feel like it was worth releasing.
Because it was still something PHP-based, at some point serious concerns came up about decompilability, due to new decompiler software. This ultimately lead to us abandoning that project, and DarkXin leaving.

About half a year later, Steffen and I started working on something that we probably could have legally released sort of an open-source thing.
Although Phisa joined us quite soon, we didn't really get far, and since the entire project was borderline-legal at best, we abandoned that too.

I had always played with the thought of writing the entire TWLan as a PHP extension, because not only would it be a lot faster than PHP code, it would also make tampering with the code a lot harder, while still being able to provide an API to PHP code.
The only problem was that it would be an enormous amount of work. And it had already been over four years.
In late 2014 though, Steffen brought a thing called Zephir to my attention - basically a new programming language similar to PHP, which is compiled into the C code of a PHP extension - exactly what we were looking for.
Porting all code from the Yii codebase was one thing - finding and fixing bugs in Zephir was another.

It took some time, and we still don't have what we would call a "2.0"... but we have a preview of it, and it's playable.
From now on, we plan to release a new work-in-progress build every two weeks. Those will likely still have bugs, and they might not always bring a lot of changes, but it will hopefully keep us going and show the community that we're still here, and still working on it.

All versions for Windows, Linux and Mac can be downloaded here.
Important information, including detailed install instructions and the license, can be found at our new Wiki.
Please do report all bugs, errors and crashes to our issue tracker.

Keep in mind though, that this is an alpha! (Hence the version number 2.A1.)
All feature from Tribal Wars are to come with 2.0.
A Plugin API and extended features are to come with 2.1.